Donahaye, daughter of two kibbutzniks, one of them born in Israel (her mother) and the other an English born Jew, keen to help the socialist vision of an Israeli society, was born in the UK when her parents left Israel and came to live in her father’s birthplace.

She first visited Israel at the age of 10, in 1978. Losing Israel recounts her profound sense of home, belonging, commitment to Israel, and her swallowing of its myths and hero stories, as absorbed in childhood from her former kibbutznik parents. Israel was the longing-in-the-blood home; Israel was beloved grandparents; Israel her history and connection

The stories we learn in childhood, before we are able to analyse, stand outside and deconstruct them, or learn that there might also be other stories, are seductive and often, quite literally, enchanting – that is, they exert some kind of magic over us, and learning that our view of the world is a subjective, not an objective one, and that someone else is glamoured by different stories and world views, is shocking and unsettling. Often it’s the easiest, least challenging way to live to choose to view our own stories as objective and true, and to choose to view the stories of others as glamours, wrong, false, subjective.

As with any national narrative, in order to legitimise itself, the modern Israeli one is grafted, like a new fruiting variant, onto an old gnarled trunk with deep historical roots

So, for Donahaye, `the Arab’ was dangerous, one who was trying to take `our land’. And then, the complicated history of Israel, or Palestine, or what had been the British Mandate, rather flung itself upon her, after she discovered the role of those passionately idealistic kibbutzniks, including her own grandfather, in taking those “desert wastes and uncultivated scrublands”, to build the kibbutz. Build Israel, There was a false potency in the myth of desert wastes and uncultivated scrublands, a false potency in naming that land, the ownership it implies, that hid the other story of displacement. Not the sorry uncultivated scrubs, but land already settled and farmed by Palestinians. Who has displaced whom, in all its sorry complexity, becomes the theme of this painful, honest and unresolved exploration

Israel’s national anthem is in minor chords, saturated with longing for a redemption that cannot be, a hope that cannot be fulfilled, because who can ever be fully at home in the world when that home rests on the homelessness of others

Donahaye was well into middle age before that other story, that Palestinian story, began to demand she listened to it. Although she had grown up in the UK, where there has been open, sometimes deeply painful dissent between the concepts which `Israel’ and `Palestine’ contain, she then spent over 10 years in America, where perhaps the Palestinian arguments have not been so widely listened to. In conflicts, the history which gets heard is that of the victors. It is not `the true’ history. It is the history of the victors. The `true’ history must always be knotty and uncomfortable : it contains oppositions.

How can we ever come to this place (‘Peace’, written in Arabic and Hebrew); the need gets ever more urgent

I didn’t find Donahaye’s late realisation of that other history surprising, precisely because those beliefs we grow up with, as received truths, whatever they are, shape us. Changing our fundamental beliefs, `losing our faith’ – whether that is religious, political, or any other belief which is as much emotional as intellectual, is an overwhelming experience. Letting go of our cultural and family myths may in the end be liberating, but there is likely to be a deeply painful process involved in that awakening. For Donahaye, it was also linked with the rightness – or wrongness – of her own family history, rewriting her heroic parents and grandparents and finding darker actions in their past

No matter what I learn about its history, what I feel about its government’s acts, its citizens electoral choices, what I think about its political foundations and exclusions, Israel is inextricably caught up with my mother – my inaccessible, elusive mother, who left her community and her country, but inwardly never left, who carried her home all the years of my childhood not in a book…..but in the locked chamber of her heart

I discovered (and was not at all surprised) that Donahaye is a poet. She has that poetic sensibility of grasping the importance and texture of language, of writing, not only beautifully, but with thought, with precision, working images, narratives, descriptions and reflections, whether of her own internal debates and confusions, or what she sees outside her, with freshness, immediacy, authenticity.

She has also been, all her life, a passionate bird-watcher. And ruefully reflects how language to describe bird travels and origins: `native’, `migrants,’ comes to have a weightier meaning in that land whose name is loaded, always denying the other. Israel/Palestine – whose home? This became a particularly powerful, and unresolved metaphor in the name of a particular bird, native to the region. As a child, she learned to call this bird the orangetufted sunbird. However, its other name is the Palestine sunbird:

When I was a child we never called it the Palestine sunbird, because we never used the word Palestine…..Naming acknowledges and therefore begins to validate a story. Not naming erases. …it renders a thing void…..semantically the name Palestine erases Israel…the meanings and associations of the word Israel semantically erases Palestine

This is an honest, and a painful book. An uncomfortable one because the author does not take a black and white decision, there is not clear-cut, done and dusted resolution. Rather she stays in that difficult place of nuance. Our stories, it seems to me, all our stories, closely examined, are ambiguous

Love of a person, of a place – the more you know, the more complicated it is. The knowledge that the person is wounded, that the place is stained doesn’t diminish your love…..your need to love is a longing to feel whole, knowing you cannot be whole – a longing to be home, though you will never be at home in one place, not fully

I recommend this book unreservedly. She took me into the heart of the real battleground – we glibly talk about `hearts and minds’ and how we have to win the hearts and minds to resolve conflicts, but it seems to me that is the only real and lasting solution to the eternal, global conflicts which our complex, conflicted species, each and every one of us, are so prone to.

This might, or might not seem trivial, but every picture I looked at for inclusion, had another retaliatory picture behind it : my suffering, yes but you caused My suffering, here are MY dead children : and here are MINE. In the end, I found almost everything I saw provoked a raging fire, and I felt trapped by each image adding fuel to each side. Everything was oil to that flame.

I received Losing Israel as a digital review copy from the publishers, Seren, via NetGalley

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8 thoughts on “Jasmine Donahaye – Losing Israel”

Excellent review! Glad you enjoyed it – it seemed like a Fancifull one. I don’t let her off the hook quite so easily of managing to hit middle age without looking at the other side of the argument, but sadly fanatics on both sides of any debate seem able to completely ignore what they don’t want to hear. However, unlike most, at least Donahaye came to a realization of the complexities in the end. Unfortunately, based on some of the comments on my review, her book will fall on deaf ears and the myth-makers will continue to cry ‘victim’ without ever looking to see if there might be other victims too. Of all the situations in the world, the one I despair of ever being resolved is Israel/Palestine, and Britain’s role in the whole thing is a badge of shame on us – more than any other after-effect of Empire. Haha! Happy Monday!

So I scurried over to your blog to see the posts which arrived after I had initially commented. Yes, indeed. This adds nothing towards any solutions, but I’m minded about what happens sometimes to deeply traumatised animals (and human animals too, not just 4 legged ones) In order to heal from the wounds of trauma, and not to be endlessly in a state of nervous system hyperarousal, what is needed most of all of course is a place of safety, and time – and the wounded one ALSO needs a kind of internal resilience, which not everyone has, like some kind of constitutional existing strength. Now, I’m looking at this purely biologically/anatomically, trying to take any emotion out.

But now, to take it wider – I think the absolute horror of the Holocaust confronted us with unbelievable darkness about our capabilities for – I have to use the word evil, though it has a lot of tangled up connotations to do with religion, devils, tempters, sin etc which I’m not wanting to engage with. I think it lost us innocence and hopefulness about ourselves – if anyone was capable of doing what people did, potentially, we all are – born in certain times and certain places we would be different from what we are, having been born in the times and places we are. So, it seems to me in some ways we are all so traumatised, collectively, by the shock of that Holocaust (even if we don’t personally have families who were caught up it in) and it can lead to a kind of special pleading on behalf of those who suffered a trauma which no one should have had to suffer. As you say, there are always others who are also victims. But the Middle East, for sure, takes us, all of us, into that ‘hot emotional place’ where we identify with our own suffering, strongly, and suffused with our own pain are unable to see that there is ‘other’ also in pain. As for solutions – CAN there be one, unless collectively we hear each other’s stories?

What a great review. So much to think about here … I also read and enjoyed Fiction Fan’s review earlier in the month. I so admire Jasmine Donahaye for taking on and challenging the orthodox and accepted view of how things are of the past and the present. But what an interesting comment you make, too, Lady FF, about how animals and humans need a place of safety to help them recover from trauma. This makes perfect sense. That said, I read a UN report, which said to in order for victims of terrible traumatic events to truly recover, their emotional needs must also be addressed ie: addressing their physical needs isn’t enough, they must be also given the opportunity to come to terms emotionally with what has happened to them. If they do not, they can suffer for mental illnesses and subliminally pass on their suppressed suffering and grief, and even guilt, to generations to come ( called trans-generational memory). If we think that millions and millions of people were horribly affected by WW2 – and not just the Jewish victims, whose murders were truly horrific, there were also millions of non-Jewish people killed and 15 million+ displaced people at the end of WW2 forcibly expelled from their homes and/or fleeing the Russians – that is an awful lot of victims whose emotional suffering went unaddressed and an awful lot of confusing subliminal messages sent on to future generations. Could this be why so many people still feel a need to apportion blame to everyone not on the winning side, whatever that side is, and in doing so de-humaminise them? I’m just thinking out loud, really, but looking at the terrible conflicts in the world today, not least Israel-Palastine and Syria, it is a tragedy that we have not learned by the terrible events of past. Interestingly, the UN set up the International Refugee Organisation in 1944 (or thereabouts) in order to help the millions of people already displaced by WW2 find a place to live and work. They believed, at the time, that the IRO would be needed until the late 1940s. It still exists today (called UNHCR) as there are even more displaced people ( as the result of War) than ever. Oops, I am digressing! From what you both say in your reviews, even if Donahaye hasn’t any easy answers, she has created an opportunity for a much needed discussion of an almost taboo subject and has been brave enough not to apportion blame. And I am absolutely going to read Losing Israel now. Thanks 🙂

What you say Marianne makes absolute sense to me – and I always think of ‘healing’ as being far more than what manifests viscerally. Why I like to think biologically and particularly in terms of neurobiology is there’s a kind of ‘non-judgement’ around the somatic – you know, the way mental and emotional dis-ease gets regarded, whereas people accept someone has a broken leg, a physical response. Whereas of course psyche somatises and the somatic infuses itself into ‘psyche’ I DO think we have internalised and probably also denied those feelings of guilt, and theres a kind of unconscious collective holding of it, if that makes any kind of sense at all, an ancestral holding.

One of my favourite authors, because she was an author who always shocked me into profound thinking and feeling, was Doris Lessing. She wrote most profoundly about the effects of the First World War onto her generation, born after it, that they had kind of grown up in the miasm of how it had damaged the previous generation. How much more the Second World War, when we discovered terrible things about ourselves.

I think of the deep distrust we seem to have in ‘goodness’ – we are fixated on finding the seamy out about each other – a kind of reverse of that Victorian not wanting to look at what went on ‘downstairs’ in our nether regions sublimating our ‘not nice’ sexuality. Now, we distrust the good act, and want to uncover shabbiness behind it

I do think Losing Israel is brilliant – BECAUSE it is so uncomfortable, and because she picks apart her own discomfort – not in a self indulgent way, she is trying to understand, and pushes the reader into their own uncomfortable examination too. Well, that’s what she did for me.

Yes, it makes lots of sense. A lot of sense. I read some Doris Lessing ages ago, maybe its time for a reread. As for distrust in goodness, there does seem a terrible focus on bad or negative spin in the media, a sort of uncensored bias on all that is horrible, which seeps into our everyday life, with the consequence that there’s no room or place for anything else, especially goodness. Maybe that’s just me! Oh, talking of books about WW1, have you read Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room? It deals with WW1 and the way we glorify the horrors of war … and art and the woman’s role in war, and stuff like that.

Oh my, yes, it is complicated and painful. Have you ever seen the film, Mountains of the Moon, I think it was called. It’s about Israel and Palestine. I just looked to see if I could find it on the Internet, but nowhere to be found. hmmm. May have to see if I can find my notes from grad school. I may have to add this book to my pile. You both are sooo persuasive.